Conspiracy of Angels Read online

  Contents

  Also by Michelle Belanger

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Coming Soon from Titan Books

  Also Available from Titan Books

  COMING SOON FROM MICHELLE BELANGER AND TITAN BOOKS

  Harsh Gods

  The Resurrection Game

  CONSPIRACY OF ANGELS

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783297337

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783297344

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: October 2015

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 Michelle Belanger.

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  To the members of the Shadow Syndicate,

  who have listened to my stories and shared

  with me their own.

  1

  They were after me. I didn’t know who, and I didn’t know why, but I had to get away.

  There was no other thought.

  I fell through darkness till direction lost all meaning. My seizing lungs burned. When I finally breached the surface, I saw water and no shore. Pain chewed my awareness—pain and a wrenching sense of loss like a freshly severed limb. I groped for meaning, but it fled.

  I lost count of how many times my head went under. My sodden leather jacket dragged against my shoulders—a dangerous weight. A sick jolt of anxiety stopped me from struggling out of it. The coat was important. I felt it with the same heart-knocking certainty that drove me to outpace my unseen pursuers.

  I kept swimming.

  I didn’t remember reaching land, but came aware of it in stages. Consciousness flickered like an old filmstrip. I hugged a dirty strip of beach, sand clotting my nose. The water lapped my legs. Everything hurt.

  A sharp insectile chitter brought me lurching to my knees. I came up swinging blindly, gagged on a shout, then doubled over to vomit about a gallon of the lake. Shakily, I knelt as my breath hitched in my scalded throat, then scrubbed grit and worse from the stubble on my jaw.

  That urgent sense of pursuit spurred me to my feet once again. One boot was missing, and the sock on that foot flopped like a dark tongue.

  I thought I heard a woman’s voice, keening. Trapped.

  Whirling at the sound, I hoped to catch sight of her, but I was alone, and the lake—as big as an inland sea—stretched away empty.

  Those murky waters surged before me. My vision faltered and for a moment everything dropped away into darkness. The lake became a vast abyss, and nightmares seethed in its depths. The water wasn’t water anymore, but a boiling blackness, filled with crimson eyes and gnashing teeth. I loosed an incoherent shout, stumbling backward to put as much distance as possible between myself and the dizzying vision.

  I ended up on my ass with my back pressed up against a crumbling wall of shale. When I looked back at the lake, it was just water again, gray and brooding as the leaden skies above.

  Keep moving.

  Scrambling up the embankment, I kicked away my remaining boot. I’d run barefoot. I didn’t care. A scree of stones clattered with the boot to the beach below. The guardrail twisted above me, one section skewed crazily from a collision that left green paint streaked across the metal. Hauling myself over, I bent in the dirt to catch my breath.

  My pulse pounded so hard sparkling lights strobed at the edges of my vision. For a moment it seemed like I was going to be sick again. A tractor-trailer whizzed past, snapping me out of it.

  The long, smooth stretch of two-lane country highway curved away through rolling farmland. Cornfields edged with autumn-hued trees lay opposite the lake. I couldn’t see a house in either direction.

  Just my luck.

  I needed to catch a ride and get to someplace populated. The urge for a crowd jangled as powerfully as the need to flee.

  A few cars sped by, drivers intent on their destinations. I tried flagging them down, but no one stopped. Some lady in a Malibu took one look at me and gunned her motor, swerving as she sped away. I yelled something nasty after her, but really couldn’t blame her. I looked like the kind of hitchhiker they wrote about in horror stories—scarecrow-thin, bedraggled, and dressed in black from head to toe.

  Doggedly, I kept moving.

  * * *

  It was dark and my feet were getting pretty raw by the time a semi caught me in its headlights and actually slowed. The rig pulled over to the narrow berm, wheels crunching gravel as it came to a halt. I approached the passenger side, trying to look harmless. The driver, a round-bellied man in his middle fifties, leaned over and rolled down the window nearest me. Heavy metal throbbed from the cab.

  “You wreck your motorcycle or something?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I hedged, scrubbing at the stubble on my chin.

  The man’s bushy brows drew together and his right hand dropped to the stick shift. Great. He was ready to drive away, too. I must’ve looked worse than I felt.

  “Look,” I said quickly. “I don’t know what happened. I woke up half in the lake.”

  The trucker considered this for a few moments, keen eyes lingering on my face.

  “Ah, fuck it,” he said with a shrug. “Get in. We’re almost to Ashtabula. I’ll drop ya off there.”

  Relieved, I climbed up the passenger side and settled in. My jacket squelched around me. I should have been shivering, but I just felt numb. In the darkness beyond the warm light of the cab, the chittering call of some night-thing raised the hairs on my neck. I slammed the door hurriedly, glad to be able to shut whatever it was away, then shifted my bare feet among the piles of crumpled fast food wrappers on the floor. The trucker’s brows shot up when he saw I wasn’t wearing any shoes, but he opted not to comment. Instead, he shoved a stubby-fingered hand at me by way of introduction.

  “Folks call me Big Bill,” he declared. “What’s your name, son?”

  That was when it hit me.


  I didn’t have a fucking clue.

  2

  I half-expected Big Bill to kick me out of his cab when I didn’t respond right away. He kept his hand poised stiffly between us, his frown deepening to a scowl.

  “Name’s only polite, son,” he rumbled, “but suit yerself.”

  To buy some time, I accepted his grubby clasp. The contact felt electric, and my already whirling brain burgeoned with half-formed thoughts and emotions—none of them my own. There was hesitation edging toward suspicion. A rising sense of irritation. The metallic tang of fear. I blinked, fighting to make sense of the onslaught. Instinct told me it was coming from the trucker.

  How was that even possible?

  “You on something?” Big Bill asked suspiciously, peeling his hand away. He wiped it on his thigh, as if my touch clung unpleasantly to him.

  I didn’t have an answer, but the unwelcome flood of perceptions cleared as soon as he broke contact. In its absence, my own anxieties surged with renewed intensity—the unsettling sense of pursuit and the staggering realization about my name.

  How could I forget my fucking name?

  Big Bill put the rig in gear, eyeing me skeptically the entire time. He said nothing further as he pulled back onto the road, so I turned and stared out the window, wrestling my anxious thoughts into some kind of order.

  A wallet.

  I had to have a wallet. Maybe that was why I’d refused to ditch the coat. Trying not to be obvious, I patted myself down, digging through the pockets of the leather jacket and turning them inside out. Driving gloves, a pen cap, some soggy gum wrappers. Nothing of any use whatsoever. I cursed none too softly.

  Bill blasted Metallica and focused on driving.

  I found a tiny front pocket with a metal snap rather than a zipper. It looked just big enough to hold a Zippo, or maybe an ID. Something was wedged inside of it—and wedged in tight. My hands were shaking, so it took a couple of tries to finally drag out the thin canvas wallet. It was blue and sealed with Velcro. I tore it open.

  Three waterlogged twenties. A platinum card—go me?—and a State of Ohio driver’s license.

  “Zachary Westland,” I read, squinting in the dim lighting of the cab.

  Nothing.

  Not even a flash of recognition.

  The photo on the license didn’t help. Pale blue eyes peered out at me from a long, narrow face. Gaunt cheeks, a straight nose, and a smooth brow surmounted by a shock of brown hair. It wasn’t a bad face, but it might as well have belonged to a stranger.

  The address was for an apartment in Cleveland Heights.

  “That had to be Lake Erie,” I murmured. Big Bill cleared his throat, and I realized I’d used my out-loud voice.

  “I’m gonna drop you off at the Pub n’ Sub by 531 up here,” he announced.

  I cast a sidelong glance his way.

  “How far are we from Cleveland?”

  “’Bout sixty miles,” he said. “You can catch Route 20 or I-90 from 11. They’ll both take you into the city.”

  “You’re not headed that way?”

  Big Bill fixed me with a steely glare. “Son, you’re getting out soon as we’re in East Ashtabula, and that’s all I’m gonna say on the matter.” To punctuate this, he cranked the music even louder. ‘Enter Sandman’ thundered through the cab. As dark as this stretch of country lane was, it really felt like we were heading off to never-never land.

  With Big Bill brooding beside me, I dug through the rest of the wallet, searching for anything that might loosen my stubborn memory. There was a conceal carry permit, which I hid immediately, an insurance card declaring coverage on both a Buick and a motorcycle, and a business card for what looked like a nightclub. On the back of the business card, there was something scribbled in blue ink. I didn’t think it was my handwriting.

  55 and Marginal—2

  All of it was meaningless to me.

  We passed a gas station that was already closed for the night, and pulled in next door onto a gravel lot. There was a long, squat building that looked more suited to be a machine shop than a bar. A brightly lit sign with garish green and yellow lettering declared it the Pub N’ Sub.

  “Here’s your stop,” my reluctant Good Samaritan announced. He put the rig in park and folded his arms across his chest, scowling.

  “Thanks, man,” I said, and was relieved when he didn’t extend his hand again. I wasn’t sure what had happened when we shook the first time, but I didn’t want to repeat the experience. I swung down from the cab, and he started pulling away almost as soon as my feet were on the gravel.

  I stood blinking in the harsh glare of the floodlights mounted on the roof of the single-story bar. The wide lot held two semis, half a dozen mud-spattered pickups, and a few bikes out front. A couple of neon signs in the windows let me know I could get fresh eats and cold beer—except the “E” in “Eats” flickered dully, making the sign read, “Fresh ats.” I pondered the nature of a “fresh at” while I tried to figure out my next move.

  I had an address. It was safe to assume that’s where I lived, but with no car and no shoes, the sixty miles to Cleveland might as well have been six million. Maybe I could use the phone and call a cab.

  Throwing my slightly less sodden leather jacket over my shoulder, I picked my way across to the entrance of the pub, the gravel sharp and painful against the raw pads of my feet. The wind kicked up, scattering dried leaves across my path. If it was cold, I didn’t feel it. From about ten paces out I could hear the muffled strains of country music, and I drew up short when I spied a predictable sign on the door:

  NO SHIRT. NO SHOES.

  NO SERVICE.

  To which was appended in less-regular red letters, No Shit.

  “Really not my fucking day.” I sighed, then shook my head and went in anyway. The worst they could do was throw me out, right?

  3

  I opened the door to a sensory assault—fryer grease, cigarette smoke, stale sweat and even staler beer. Half a dozen old TVs were mounted at various angles over the bar and seating area. The pictures flickered unsteadily and not a single one had the same color balance. Loud country music blared from the speakers, completely drowning out anything coming over the TVs—and yet none of the TVs were on mute, adding a dull, insensible hum to the chaos. The bass of the speakers completely swallowed the treble, so what little I could hear of the lyrics came out garbled at best.

  Considering it was country, maybe that was a mercy.

  I flinched as—for an instant—it seemed as if the patrons of the bar were shouting, all at once. There were about ten of them, and the cacophony drowned even the din of the music and TVs, then abruptly receded as I realized almost no one’s mouth was moving. Most of the guys just sat morosely, staring into their beers. The bartender looked up as I hesitated near the door.

  He was big, not as tall as I was, but broader again by half. I figured he had about fifty pounds on me, and little of that was fat. He had a hair net beneath which a snowy sweep of ponytail started about halfway back on his scalp. Of all things, he had a beard net, too, covering a plume of white and gray long enough to make a Tolkien dwarf envious. As he regarded me, his ice-chip eyes went ten degrees chillier.

  “Sign’s there fer a reason,” he grunted in a basso voice that cut easily through the noise.

  I was still trying to work out why I’d heard voices. Was I hallucinating?

  “If I had shoes, I’d be wearing them,” I shot back. “Look, I just need the pay phone… and change for a twenty.” I approached the bar, holding out one of my soggy bills. From the look of his stained and greasy apron, he was also the cook. He squinted down at the damp and crumpled money, then took in the whole of my appearance.

  “The heck happened to you?” he grunted.

  Wish I knew, I thought, but I just shrugged. Out loud I answered, “Bad day. I don’t imagine cabs come all the way out here?”

  He quirked an eyebrow at me. It was one of those old-guy eyebrows where a couple of the hairs
had gone wild and grew three times as long as any of the others. They stuck out from the middle like curling antennae.

  “From where?”

  “Cleveland?” I asked hopefully.

  A few of the patrons stole sideways glances at me and snorted over their beers. The bartender let out a bellowing laugh.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  It was worth a shot.

  That left me with the business card. Glossy black, it had “Heaven” stamped on it in stylish silver lettering. The phone number and address were in red. I had no idea how or even if it pertained to me. At least there was a number I could call. That was somewhere to start.

  “Is there a hotel nearby?” I asked glumly, just in case Heaven didn’t pan out.

  “Roadway Express ’bout a mile the other side of town,” he offered.

  “If you’ve got their number, I’ll take that, too.”

  Shaking his head, the bartender grabbed something bulky from under the register and chucked it. I caught the phone book with a speed and accuracy that surprised even me, snapping my left hand up and seeming to pluck the unwieldy tome from mid-air. I paused, staring at this. Half a dozen of the bar’s patrons were staring now, too. Whispers surged, threatening to swell into shouting again. I closed my eyes against the sensation, fighting for order in my own head.

  “Uh… thanks,” I muttered a little weakly. I tucked the phone book under one arm and did my best to look inconspicuous. At six foot three and covered in lake muck, it wasn’t happening.

  Still shaking his head and muttering to himself, the fellow counted out my change and set the money on the bar. I scooped up the bills and quarters, pointedly avoiding touching his hand. Biker Santa jerked his thumb toward an alcove which, according to the battered tin sign tacked above it, also led to the “Used Beer Department.”

  “Phone’s back there,” he said, then he abruptly turned around and ignored me.

  The pay phone was clunky and ancient, but I hadn’t expected anything less. In this age of ubiquitous cell phones, I was just happy the bar hadn’t ripped the thing out and replaced it with some flashy gambling machine.

  It was dented on one side, some of the paint scraped down to the metal. I ran a finger over one of the dents curiously, then froze as I got that electric feeling again. Something blossomed in my mind—not just thoughts this time, but whole images. They came in rapid flashes, like a stop-motion film, each scene super-saturated with emotion. A man in a pale shirt and a cowboy hat pacing on the phone—this phone. A woman on the other end—and somehow I could see her, too. She was seated on a couch with a hideous floral print, a box of tissues open on the coffee table before her. She had a black eye and raw bruises across her jaw and chin.